So, Anglicans, how about just a straight-up trade: You can have all the people in the Catholic Church who believe in "equality" in sex and marriage and priesthood and who hold the idea of a "woman's right to choose" as her paramount right,
...and we'll take all your Christians.
Fine by me.
ReplyDeleteThat would be a beautiful thing.
ReplyDeleteDear Miss White,
ReplyDeleteAs someone who left the U.S. Episcopal Church just over a year ago, and had my Rite of Welcome yesterday in my Dominican Parish in Seattle's University District, I fear that there is one obstacle to the successful implementation of your proposal. Namely, that I suspect that the vast majority of Christian Anglicans (dear me, it is painful to have to be quite so frank, but truth requires accuracy), have so internalized the Protestant error that the majority of them would probably opt for some less sacramental and less Catholic alternative than that which exists in TEC.
Mind you, the act of differentiation would still be beneficial to those who choose to depart the Anglican fold, but I daresay that it would be a modest minority who would choose to come home to Holy Mother Church.
Even ror me, and despite the exceptionally strong suspicion that my departure from TEC was imminent, it required what I can only interpret as an epiphany from God to show me that my way forward as a Christian required me to seek union with the Catholic Church. And I was only able to verbalize the sense of that epiphany five and one half months later, when I read a quotation from John Henry Newman.
Because my wife, who is a cradle Episcopalian who has left TEC and attends my Catholic parish, feels a great sense of loss concerning the linguistic and musical patrimony of Anglicanism, I do entertain the hope that there might be some possibility of an Anglican Use parish (or, lacking that, a periodic Anglican Use Mass) near enough to us that we might be able to attend.
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer